Facing heat from restaurants, Zomato suspends Infinity Dining programme

Facing heat from partner restaurants over its "deep discounting schemes", food delivery platform Zomato has suspended the Infinity Dining programme from its app.

A Zomato spokesperson confirmed the development to The Economic Times, saying they have received "a range of feedback about Infinity Dining, and have paused it as we incorporate the feedback".

Introduced in July, the Infinity Dining programme allowed Zomato's Gold subscribers to order unlimited food and drinks at a set price from the menu of partner restaurants for a limited period of time. 

The programme was launched in three cities with over 300 restaurants.

The National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) said it a was "huge victory" for them.  

“Infinity was the tipping point of the logout campaign. It is a huge victory for restaurant companies that it has been withdrawn,” NRAI Mumbai chapter head Anurag Katriar told the business daily.

Online food delivery aggregators, especially Zomato, and NRAI are at loggerheads for over a month.

The restaurant association had started #Logout campaign on August 14 against aggressive pricing and deep discounting by restaurant aggregators. Following which many eateries had had left these platforms.

The issue has been going back and forth between both sides since then, with Zomato’s Gold scheme being at the centre of much discussion around deep discounting. Zomato Gold began last year as an exclusive, invite-only service, targeted at high-end restaurants serving niche customers who may already be their patrons. 

In August, Zomato's founder Deepinder Goyal had admitted that his company made mistakes with its premium subscription service ‘Gold’ and would make changes to the appease restaurants.

“Somewhere, we have made mistakes and things haven’t gone as planned. This is a wake-up call that we need to do 100x more for our restaurant partners than we have done before,” Goyal tweeted.

Later, the company had shared a Gold modification plan that addressed some of the issues raised by NRAI. However, NRAI rejected the proposal saying the move from exclusive membership to being available to everyone has made Gold lose its sheen forever.